<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2019 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
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**/

$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Thank you, scammer.',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/03/07.jpg" alt="The remains of the pirate snow fort from last week" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<h3>Time</h3>
		<p>
			I study best at night.
			Unfortunately though, I work night shifts.
			It takes me a bit to get started on coursework in the day, and when I get home from work, I&apos;m often too tired to get much done.
			I make it work though.
			Hmm.
			Maybe I should ask the boss if I can start working morning shifts again, like I used to years ago.
			I&apos;m not sure why they moved me to night shift though, so maybe they had a good reason.
		</p>
		<h3>Place</h3>
		<p>
			I study best at home on my couch.
			My mother&apos;s in the process of a move though, and is using my living room as a storage place for her boxes.
			My couches are on end, tucked away, so she can have more space.
			I also do pretty well on my bed and on the chair I&apos;ve moved to the entryway, assuming I can get an Internet connection.
			My Wi-Fi reception is rather spotty, at best.
		</p>
		<p>
			I&apos;ve tried studying at the local library, which has a great Wi-Fi connection most of the time, but I find the place too distracting and I can&apos;t eat as I get hungry, as food is disallowed there.
		</p>
		<h3>Environment</h3>
		<p>
			I study best when not being censored, which unfortunately means not at this school.
			Censorship greatly stresses me and I get incredibly lethargic whenever I even think about my coursework.
		</p>
		<p>
			I find noise and people to be highly distracting as well.
			Some people need constant sound input, but for me, I can&apos;t get much studying done in such an environment.
			If there&apos;s music on, I can&apos;t get anything that requires concentration done.
			If there are people around, I can get a little done, but my efficiency is drastically reduced.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I&apos;m not a fan of Google, but they do ask some good interview questions.
		</p>
		<div class="cited-quotation">
			<a href="https://www.inc.com/business-insider/google-hardest-interview-questions.html"><cite>41 of Google&apos;s Toughest Interview Questions | Inc.com</cite></a>
			<blockquote>
				<p>
					What three things would you change at your university/workplace if you were $a[CEO] today?
				</p>
			</blockquote>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			Indeed doesn&apos;t seem to have very relevant listings, when it comes to jobs for Joomla! developers and Joomla! administrators.
			However, our other option, LinkedIn, doesn&apos;t allow visits by non-members.
			Even if I registered an account there, I wouldn&apos;t be able to link to the specific job listings I&apos;d chosen because students without an account wouldn&apos;t be able to view such listings and students with accounts would have that added to the data LinkedIn is gathering about users.
			No legitimate website makes you log in to view basic information (with a possible exception for pay walls).
			A legitimate job-hunting website would only make you register to submit applications, not to look to see if any jobs were worth applying to.
			Most likely, LinkedIn just demands that you log in because they want to be able to track what you look at even between sessions and tie what you look at to a real-world identity, which if you ask me, is rather creepy.
			I can&apos;t in good conscience link to listings behind login walls and coerce you all to register accounts on that noxious website to see what I saw; I&apos;m not a monster, after all.
			So I&apos;ve stuck with the less-relevant listings on the much-more-reasonable website.
		</p>
		<h3>Skills</h3>
		<p>
			Various skills employers want employees having include the following:
		</p>
		<ul>
			<li>
				Being able to build, change, and look over Web pages using a content-management system (such as Joomla!)
			</li>
			<li>
				Decent communication and collaboration skills, including communicating with both team leaders and clients on a daily basis
			</li>
			<li>
				English language skills were heavily emphasised, but that was because I live in a mostly-English-speaking country.
				Jobs in other countries will likely emphasise their respective languages.
			</li>
			<li>
				Proactivity in noticing changes and suggestions made
			</li>
			<li>
				$a[HTML] and $a[CSS] skills and experience
			</li>
			<li>
				A positive attitude and the desire to learn, and the ability to learn and adapt quickly
			</li>
			<li>
				A willingness to teach those junior to you
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to meet deadlines
			</li>
			<li>
				At least five years of experience with Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, and/or Debian;
				Debian&apos;s pretty much the only system I use at home, so that&apos;s an easy one for me.
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to install, configure, and maintain Linux-based system, including performance-tuning them
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to install, configure, and manage MySQL instances
			</li>
			<li>
				System security knowledge and skills
			</li>
			<li>
				Shell-, Perl-, $a[PHP]-, and Unlang-scripting skills
			</li>
			<li>
				$a[TLS] (incorrectly called $a[SSL] in the job posting) certificate-management skills
			</li>
			<li>
				Experience in troubleshooting $a[VPN]s
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to manage and configure Samba
			</li>
			<li>
				Experience configuring both $a[DNS] and $a[DHCP] using both $a[BIND] and Windows (ugh, Windows)
			</li>
			<li>
				Windows experience is a plus, though doesn&apos;t seem to be a hard requirement outside the context of $a[DNS] (including $a[BIND]) and $a[DHCP]
			</li>
			<li>
				Current industry certifications
			</li>
			<li>
				Experience managing caching servers
			</li>
			<li>
				Experience writing probes for monitoring software
			</li>
			<li>
				Version-control (Git, et cetera) skills
			</li>
			<li>
				General Joomla! skills
			</li>
			<li>
				Ability to configure and optimise systems that run large numbers of websites vital to various businesses
			</li>
			<li>
				Experience with many popular Web technologies, including WordPress, Drupal, $a[PHP] frameworks, and databases
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to set up and maintain complex server clusters
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to work with cloud technologies
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to manage high-volume $a[IPv6] networks
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to help customers find the right tech for their needs
			</li>
			<li>
				The ability to present the company you work for as if it were your own company
			</li>
			<li>
				Several skills with things I don&apos;t yet know the meaning of
			</li>
		</ul>
		<p>
			Clearly, there&apos;s a diverse range of skills employers are looking for from their employees in the tech industry.
			Joomla! skills are only one piece of the puzzle.
		</p>
		<h3>Training opportunities</h3>
		<p>
			The main training opportunity Id recommend is to just read the manual.
			When we studied $a[PHP] in this course, a good chunk of our studies consisted of manual-reading, which is exactly how I learned $a[PHP] myself over a decade ago.
			There&apos;s no reason to think learning to use Joomla! should be any different in that regard.
			Most large, popular free software projects, such as $a[PHP] and Joomla!, have very good manuals, useful both for learning to use the product to begin with and for later reference.
			(I mean, who&apos;s going to remember every last $a[PHP] function, including its parameters and return values?
			You&apos;re going to need to look back to the manual sometimes.)
		</p>
		<h3>Joomla!-related jobs I could apply for</h3>
		<p>
			Before I go any further, I&apos;d like to point out that the words &quot;could&quot; and &quot;would&quot; have very different meanings.
			I have not looked into any of these companies, and thus don&apos;t know if working for them would even be tolerable.
			We each have our own needs, and I make no assertion that these companies would meet mine.
			Most software development jobs these days wouldn&apos;t be a good fit for me, and there&apos;s a good chance I&apos;ll get into something that doesn&apos;t involve programming and just keep programming as a hobby.
		</p>
		<p>
			These three jobs are available:
		</p>
		<ul>
			<li>
				<a href="https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=932deb0035570938">Web Content Publisher</a>
			</li>
			<li>
				<a href="https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=bcd857f00c0113ef">SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR</a> (they shouted it first, I&apos;m only repeating it)
			</li>
			<li>
				<a href="https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=ef99fcb319ec2fc3">LAMP &amp; Server Administrator</a>
			</li>
		</ul>
		<p>
			The web-content-publishing job seems least like something I could do, but also seems to be the one most related to Joomla!, so I included it.
			The other two jobs relate more to keeping the system running instead of publishing the content, so instead of using Joomla! as your platform, you administrate Joomla! and other software to keep it running so others can use it.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="religion">
	<h2>Religion</h2>
	<p>
		The lesson of the missionaries didn&apos;t get derailed today, as to get derailed, it&apos;d have to have started on the rails.
		We were so far from the rails today that we didn&apos;t even see them.
		The pair of missionaries brought over a new convert, who&apos;s only been with the church for about a year, and the three of them wanted me to ask questions about what I&apos;ve been reading.
		There was no chance to move on and learn more of their intended lessons, and we instead worked on chipping away at the mountain of things I planned to ask once I finish reading the Book of Mormon.
		Most of what we covered, I&apos;ve added to my <a href="/en/religion/scripture/Mormon.xhtml">notes on the Book of Mormon</a>.
		It&apos;s been my intent since they first started trying to justify the things the book says that I&apos;d add their take on it to my notes.
		It seems fair.
		If I&apos;m going to present my case, I should include their case, so as to present both sides.
		One thing that doesn&apos;t fit into those notes stood out though.
		I quoted a passage in which Laman and Lemuel were hitting Nephi with a rod, but the new convert misunderstood the context and thought the angel was hitting Laman and Lemuel with the rod.
		They explained that it wasn&apos;t just any angel that they&apos;d seen, but an important angel, as angels with authority have their authority manifested physically in some sort of rod, crook, or staff.
		That&apos;s interesting.
		I&apos;ll have to keep that in mind as I continue reading.
	</p>
	<p>
		One of the missionaries I&apos;d been seeing got stationed, so a new one came today.
		I&apos;d met them in church last Sunday though, so it was no surprise.
		Anyway, with a new pair of missionaries (one member of the new pair was a member of the old pair, but still, there&apos;s going to be a different dynamic between them, changing how they operate a bit), they&apos;ve decided to have me switch from praying about whether I should get baptised to whether Yahweh even exists.
		They don&apos;t realise my first prayer topic has been answered already, be it an answer from Jehovah or just an answer from luck itself, but it doesn&apos;t really make sense to continue praying about the baptism anyway.
		As for my answer, I found it in the form of <cite>2 Nephi 31:14</cite>:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			But, behold, my beloved brethren, thus came the voice of the Son unto me, saying:
			After ye have repented of your sins, and witnessed unto the Father that ye are willing to keep my commandments, by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost, and can speak with a new tongue, yea, even with the tongue of angels, and after this should deny me, it would have been better for you that ye had not known me.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<p>
		I take this to be an attack on apostates.
		If you leave the church, it would have been better that you had not joined.
		Joining the church is made official, as hinted by the passage above, though baptism.
		So what does this mean for me?
		If I get baptised into the church and the missionaries fail to convince me, I get labelled as an apostate which, according to the passage above, is worse than having never being a member of the church.
		To put it simply, I need more evidence, and the church needs to convince me of the truth of their holy scriptures <strong>*before*</strong> baptism, not after.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="scam">
	<h2>Hilarious scammer</h2>
	<p>
		I received a hilarious email today.
		A scammer claims to have infected my system with a keylogger and captured video from my webcam during masturbation.
		If I don&apos;t pay a large sum in Bitcoins to a specific address, they&apos;ll release the footage to my contacts, which they also copied from my machine.
		Using the keylogger, they&apos;ve captured the passwords I&apos;ve used to access all the Web accounts I&apos;ve accessed in the past unspecified amount of time.
		As proof they&apos;ve keylogged me, they got into my email account and sent the letter from my own account.
		Hilarious.
		They also said that Bitcoin addresses are case sensitive, so I should copy and paste their Bitcoin address from their email.
		Except, they didn&apos;t put a single bit of text in the email.
		Instead, they sent me an image with the text to avoid setting off spam filters that might try to filter based on the content of the text.
		I couldn&apos;t copy and paste that address they sent even if I tried.
	</p>
	<p>
		On the contents of their message though ...
		First of all, that&apos;s not how email from-addresses work.
		It&apos;s a horribly insecure system, and you don&apos;t need to send from my account to make it look like an email came from me.
		It&apos;s like writing to someone via post, putting their address on both the &quot;to&quot; and &quot;from&quot; spots, then claiming how you did that was you got a copy of the key to their home and sent the letter from their place.
		No one that understand how the postal system works is falling for that.
		And no one that understands the email system is falling for this email scam.
		I swear, being tech savvy makes the threats made by most scammers into mere jokes.
		Second, I don&apos;t have a webcam.
		And third, and perhaps most hilarious of all, I don&apos;t type my passwords.
		I copy and paste them from my KeePassX password manager.
		That means no keylogger will <strong>*ever*</strong> capture any of my passwords, save for the one that unlocks the encrypted password database, the one that logs me into my account (which doubles as a <code>sudo</code> password), and the one that decrypts my hard drive.
		The scammer claims they caught passwords I typed into websites, which isn&apos;t even a possibility.
		Thank you, scammer.
		I needed a good laugh.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
